And the award for Editing goes to…

For the past three days, I've been able to skip out on work and spend my days training in how to use Adobe Premiere Pro: a professional video editing software. My employer has paid for me to take a course, which just finished today.

I did take a one-on-one training about a year ago, but at the time I had never laid a finger on the software and so didn't really have a good sense of what I needed to know. It wasn't a structured course and I had no clue what questions to ask. So I just soaked up what I could and went back to the office to practice.

That training wasn't bad. It certainly allowed me to use some of the program's basic features to create a couple of basic slide shows. I'm even working on putting together a video highlight reel from a lecture organized through work, but it's not quite done yet.

Anyway, not to speak ill of the first trainer, but for me, a 3-day, structured, hands-on course is a much better way to learn. I now feel that I know a helluva lot more about Premiere Pro than I did going in. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on some video footage.

Adobe is a great set of products. They just take so much effort to learn. In the end, that effort always pays off with really professional-looking results, but finding the time and budget to do the training is the hard part. I have done some training on my own, with videos, but it's so much easier to veg out on the sofa in the evening than to sit in front of a computer watching tutorials. I'm lucky that my employer budgets funds for professional development.

I'm also happy that I got to use my personal PD budget before the end of fiscal year and that, in a couple of months, I can start looking into other software worth learning!